Ferrari engineers examining nuts

Ferrari has confirmed that Felipe Massa’s crucial last lap pit stop delay in Germany was due a problem with a wheelnut design that was new for the British GP.

In the race for ever faster stops Ferrari introduced the new nut for Silverstone, where it contributed to fast stops. It also worked well for the first five of the six stops at the Nurburgring, but not for Massa’s last lap stop, costing him fourth place to Sebastian Vettel.

“It was a problem of the nut on the front left tyre that went disconnected from the wheel gun,” said Stefano Domenicali in Germany. “That is something that is part of this game. We are stretching everything up to the limit to minimise the pit stop time. In this case it was a problem on the technical side.”

Today the team elaborated on the problem.

“Since the beginning of the year we have had various issues with pit stops,” said Head of Track Operations, Diego Ioverno. “Which we are currently fixing step by step, knowing that this year, with so many stops, anything can happen. And indeed we have seen other teams also experience difficulties in this area.

“Our issues concerned the car itself and the jig of the tools we use and especially the wheel nuts, where we have had several problems. Silverstone was the first race we ran with a completely new specification of wheel nut, which has been very interesting, because in the British Grand Prix, our pit stops were the quickest in the race.

“Then, in Germany we were again using this new wheel nut, which does work better, but the system is still not perfect and, at Felipe’s last tyre change, we lost the connection between the wheel nut and wheel nut gun, which cost us around one and a half seconds. So we have more work to do on perfecting it.”